Font Rendering

Updated: April 19, 2023

You can use use the FreeType and Fontconfig libraries to render fonts and to customize font configurations respectively.

Fonts are available on your development host under $QNX_TARGET/usr/share/fonts. If you install other application frameworks to use with your Screen applications, the location of your fonts may be different (e.g., /opt/qt5/lib/fonts for a Qt5 installation).

Screen supports the following libraries:

FreeType

You can use the FreeType library with Screen to render glyphs from font files. This library produces glyph images of most vector and bitmap font formats. It's available on your development host:

$QNX_TARGET/processor/usr/lib/libfreetype.so
                    

where processor is the CPU architecture of your target hardware (e.g. armle-v7).

For information on the FreeType software library, see https://www.freetype.org.
Fontconfig

You can use the Fontconfig library to configure and customize font configurations for your target system. You still require another rendering-mechanism (e.g., FreeType) to render the fonts themselves. The Fontconfig library is available on your development host:

$QNX_TARGET/processor/usr/lib/libfontconfig.so
                    

where processor is the CPU architecture of your target hardware (e.g. armle-v7).

For information on the Fontconfig software library, see https://www.fontconfig.org.

When you use these libraries, ensure that your environment variables (e.g., $LD_LIBRARY_PATH) are correctly set to include the location of these libraries on your target.

Note: If you're using application frameworks (e.g., Qt) with Screen, you must ensure that you also have the appropriate font configuration that's required by those frameworks.